6/13/2012

The Blue Mustang Cake

Blue Mustang Cake

My sister’s
boyfriend had a Birthday coming up and, as he is very special to my sister, he
deserved a very special cake to celebrate his existence. So, I decided to make
him a car cake (all man love cars, right?). I have never carved a cake before and my first,
and only, experience with fondant was a while back and the result not really
worth mentioning… But, he really
deserves the extra thoughtfulness, as I said, he is in love with my sister, and so I
started baking.My Dad reassured
me: „A Mustang really is a universally cool car!“ and I found these and these great
pictures of Mustangs to model the cake after. Besides liking the blue, I hoped it wouldn´t
be too hard to recognize because of its clear structure and features. Fortunately
somebody even wrote a Wikipedia entry with all the exact measurements so I
could get all the proportions right (of course, it is not perfect, but it is just cake after all).

I made this
chocolate cake recipe but I cut the sugar in halve and added a teaspoon of
ground espresso beans. The cake is a very fluffy, delicious chocolate cake and
would be perfectly sweet enough on its own but it is definitely not missing any
sugar when you cover it in strawberry swiss meringue buttercream and
marshmallow fondant, which I did.

I sliced
the cake into eight layers, filled them with buttercream and got carving. With
all the measurements and pictures it was easier that I expected and the cake
got into Mustang shape quite quick. Surprisingly, it actually drew my Dad into
the kitchen a lot, which usually doesn´t happen at all. When I thought the cake
looked good enough, I covered the whole thing in buttercream, put it in the
fridge and rolled out the marshmallow fondant I had made before and then
covered the chilled cake with it. I got a bit lazy with all the other
decorations. Besides the blue, I only used white fondant and colored all the
little details in with edible ink pens but I really think it worked great!

Not to
forget the most important: the birthday boy really loved his Mustang cake,
especially his personalized registration plates. I was really happy and proud seeing
that I could make such a special cake which made someone that happy and when quite
a few guests asked for an additional piece of cake to take home for breakfast,
that was just the icing on top.